Keep her quiet, p.22
Keep Her Quiet, page 22
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Please don’t leave yet. I don’t want to be on my own.’
‘I’ve got work to do.’
He rammed the key into the lock, desperate to get away, not just from temptation but from the morbid horror of being confined with her, with her warm, pulsing body, her scent and the unpleasantly competing odours of food, stale air and damp.
He could feel her stricken gaze, with all its neediness and anger, on his profile. He turned once to look at her, then shot out of the room, slammed the door and locked it.
‘Fuck.’
This would not do.
Leo threw himself on to the sagging leather sofa and put his feet up. They were so close to finishing, why had he allowed her to muddy the waters? He tried to focus his mind, but he kept reliving that moment. He could feel her hand on his arm, the pressure of her breasts.
He flicked through the manuscript to the end and lifted the corners of his mouth in grudging admiration. He had to hand it to her, she had initiative.
I owe eternal thanks to Tessa Dudley, for her invaluable input.
Did she think he was born yesterday? He had no doubt it was a coded message of some kind. He screwed up the sheet of paper and aimed it at the bin, then got up with a grunt. At his computer, he scrolled to the acknowledgements page, positioned the cursor and typed, ‘I am indebted to …’ He scratched his head. What name would placate and flatter Zoe but mean nothing to Jenny, or Hannah Faulkner for that matter? Maisie, he decided. After Maisie Gallagher, the heroine of In the Lake, the book Zoe had left behind in Albert Square Gardens. Maisie what, though? Something clever. Faulkner, he thought. Falconer. Hunter.
I am indebted to Maisie Hunter, for her wisdom.
Zoe would appreciate that.
On the other hand, would it provoke questions from Jenny? He deleted it and started again.
… to Maisie Hunter, for her generous help in researching this novel.
If Jenny asked, he would explain that Maisie was an American lawyer, specializing in family law. But she wouldn’t ask because she never did. At any rate, he might think of something better down the line. There was no hurry.
He rocked back and laced his fingers behind his neck. For a moment, he allowed himself to reimagine that kiss, to wonder what it would have been like to take it further. Then he shut down the thought with a shout of annoyance and reached for the whisky bottle.
47
Hannah
HANNAH HAD CONSIDERED TRAVELLING STRAIGHT TO Sparrow Cottage from London, but by the time she reached Maidstone station her headache had developed into such a bad migraine that it was all she could do to drive home and crawl into bed. Any movement induced an agony so crippling she almost threw up.
She took an over-the-counter sleeping pill and slept, waking in the morning with the right side of her head feeling as though it had been sliced through. She rang Anita and told her she wouldn’t be coming in. By late afternoon the pain had begun to abate and she found she could think again. Zoe had seen the article and it had made her question her life. What else had she seen? With shaking hands, she opened her wardrobe door and felt around for the envelope. It was still there, but it was empty. She burst into tears.
Why couldn’t Zoe have confronted her with the wristbands? Why did she have to go after the Creaseys? She knew her daughter. She would have been profoundly shocked, but she would also have been lost in the romance of it all. Zoe was a daydreamer – had been since childhood – only this time the daydream had turned out to be real.
Oh, Zoe.
Instead of demanding the truth from Hannah, she had gone for the dramatic reunion and found herself alone with Leo. She had no way of knowing that she held his reputation in her hands, that she could bring his life tumbling down. In her naivety she would have expected him to be happy to see her, but Leo would have been horrified and afraid.
Zoe would be eighteen tomorrow, and she would spend her birthday a prisoner of her own father. Hannah put her head in her hands. She could blame other people; Michael Brady, her parents, but really it was her fault her daughter was suffering; it was all the bad decisions she had made, the weakness she had shown. Zoe was stronger than her. She had long known that. She prayed for her and for the strength to outwit Leo.
What did Leo do with her? He must have brought her into the house. Would he have drugged her? But she couldn’t think like that. Zoe wasn’t stupid – she would have realized what was happening and tried to escape.
Her mind wouldn’t stop. Had he persuaded Zoe she could never go home? What if he’d told her Hannah had killed her baby, had shaken it? Hannah’s stomach churned. She had done just that, hadn’t she? She would go to prison and be an object of hatred. If Leo had poisoned Zoe with his lies, she would never want to see Hannah again. That was reason enough for her to disappear. She might have changed her identity and found a new life in London. Hannah shuddered. She knew what could happen to innocent and friendless young girls who arrived in the city in search of work.
She left the house and drove to Sparrow Cottage, turning on to the track that led up towards the woods. Just above the trees, the clouds drifted over a sliver of moon. She lingered until she felt ready to confront Leo, thinking back to that night. She didn’t often take herself there. Despite the passage of time, it was still raw. She still occasionally gasped when a memory came back unbidden.
Who was she back then? How had she had the gall to lie to Leo Creasey and steal a baby? At seventeen, a little younger than Zoe was now, she’d been so certain that there was no other way that she hadn’t questioned the choice she made. Leo would still have had alcohol in his bloodstream when he drove them to London and he’d been in shock, yet she hadn’t given it a second thought. There was no way she would do anything like that now. She was a very different person these days. She drew a sigh and opened the door. Her feet sank into the ridges left by a tractor.
There were lights on in the cottage and his car was parked on the driveway. She could hear classical music playing; a dramatic, sweeping melody. She rang the doorbell hard. The music went off. Leo opened the door in his socked feet, a big brown cable-knit cardigan that looked like it belonged to someone else draped over his black shirt. When he saw her he scowled.
‘What do you want?’
‘I want to know where my daughter is.’
‘This is getting boring. Go away, Hannah.’
‘I know that she came looking for you. I have proof.’
He folded his arms and cocked his head to one side, considering her. ‘What proof?’
She had intended to throw the discovery of the book in his face, but that would mean he would know she had been in his house and he would find out about Tessa Dudley. She remembered when she had confronted him outside Sparrow Cottage. He had smiled at her unpleasantly, and told her that if she ever went near his wife he would kill her. He had used the word ‘eviscerate’. And here they were again, only this time it was just the two of them. If he had killed Zoe, he would have no qualms about killing her.
‘Enough for the police to be interested in you.’
‘So, what’s changed?’ he drawled. ‘I take it you no longer care if the world finds out what you did.’
She would not be bullied. ‘Why should they believe you over me? You killed my baby, you suggested I take Sophie because you knew she wasn’t yours. You wanted to get back at your wife, to hurt her like she’d hurt you. You were drunk and angry, and you made me do it. I was seventeen years old and I didn’t know anything about anything. You were in your thirties. I had no one to turn to – you had your wife and your mother. You took advantage of my distress. I’d given birth and lost my baby in the space of two days. I wasn’t in my right mind.
‘The thing is, Leo,’ she added. ‘People just love seeing the mighty fall. I’m the underdog. You’re arrogant and smug. Think about it.’
She surprised herself. She had never made such a long speech before.
‘No, I will not “think about it”. Why the hell should I? I don’t know where your daughter is, or anything about her.’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘You’re delusional. Feeding off your own fantasies. You need help.’
He didn’t sound 100 per cent confident.
‘Why don’t you just tell me where she is? You don’t want trouble any more than I do. Give her back to me. I’ve told everyone she’s living in Canada. I’ll say she’s coming back to go to university here. No one’s going to question it.’
‘Give me credit for having some intelligence.’ He sighed. ‘Can’t you see that you’re fixated on me for the wrong reasons? You’ve spent your entire adult life looking for someone to blame and I’m the obvious target. I helped you eighteen years ago and, in doing so, ruined any hope my wife had of happiness. I pay my dues every minute of every day, knowing it’s my fault she’s in torment. I could blame you, I could stalk you like you do me, but frankly I’d rather get on with what life I have left. At least I’ve made something good out of the horror. What have you done? Nothing, except whine and blame others for your misfortunes. I’ve run out of sympathy. Now go on, get lost.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Then you leave me no alternative.’
He grabbed her by the arm, frog-marched her back to the lane, and shoved her so hard she fell to her knees. She scrambled up and turned on him, but he was quicker. He held her wrists and pulled her to him, whispering into her ear.
‘What is it you really want, you stupid bitch?’
He pushed his hand under her coat and clasped her breast hard. Hannah whimpered with pain. He let her go and laughed as she scuttled away. She could feel him watching her as she stumbled up the lane, her arms crossed.
Leo had no conscience. How did you get through to a man like that? He was no better than Michael Brady.
Hearing a car approaching, Hannah panicked, thinking Leo was coming after her. She set off at a run. Was he planning to get rid of her once and for all? The headlights caught her as she staggered off the lane and on to the track. The vehicle pulled in beside her.
‘Jenny?’ came a voice.
She turned to find an elderly man eyeing her through the lowered window of a Land Rover.
‘Sorry,’ he said gruffly. ‘I thought you were someone I knew.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Friend of Leo’s, are you?’
‘It’s none of your business who I am,’ she said, walking away. She remembered him from the last time she had been here. He didn’t seem to recognize her, though.
‘Actually,’ he called after her, his voice plump with self-importance, ‘as a local magistrate, it is my business to interfere if I see any suspicious activity.’
She ignored him, getting in her own car and turning on the engine.
He waited, blocking her path, his engine running. Hannah gripped the steering wheel and stared at him in the rearview mirror. After a moment, he drove on. She followed him, drawing a sigh of relief when he turned in through his gate.
This wasn’t over. For all Leo’s bravado, she had rattled him.
48
Leo
‘I THOUGHT OF A GREAT NAME FOR THE BOOK,’ ZOE SAID.
Leo looked up. He was slouched on the armchair, reading through Zoe’s comments while she fed him pages from a steadily diminishing stack. They had been working flat out. His back and shoulders were aching, and the vague warning of trouble in his wrists and hands had become a loud alarm. He opened and closed his fists and flexed his fingers. These days he ached in unexpected places. Once this damn thing was finished, he would have a rest. He would wait three months before he even thought about completing Still Lives.
‘Oh yes?’ he said.
He already had a title in mind: The Nowhere Girl. He liked the way it sounded, the rhythm of it. It had a literary resonance he felt it deserved.
‘Go on.’
‘The Girl Who Never Was.’
He rested the pages on his knees and raised his eyebrows. ‘Really?’
‘It suits the book.’ She paused. ‘It’s what she was, right? Mum’s baby, I mean.’
‘It’s not bad. Let me think about it.’
Leo pushed his glasses up. This had been a sprint; he had never worked so intensely. Zoe pored over every phrase and called him up on things he hadn’t had a chance to think through properly. He was used to bringing out a book every three to four years, and having time to allow each draft to percolate. This was how other authors worked; normal authors who reliably provided their publisher with a three-hundred-page novel each year. And made more money than him, damn them. But that was the point, wasn’t it? It was about saving Sparrow Cottage, not his ego or his reputation as a literary genius.
Zoe rubbed the small of her back then stood up, raised her arms above her head and stretched. Her breasts lifted under her jumper. Leo looked away.
The Girl Who Never Was. She was right, the title was good. He could see it in gold letters, embossed, his name huge above them. Please God, it would be enough. If Jenny stuck to her threat, he didn’t know what he would do.
‘Just one more hour,’ he said.
He was feeling distinctly twitchy. He’d go for a walk along the Downs to get some perspective. He might even drop in at the Tickled Trout.
‘I can do more if you like,’ she said, handing him another page.
Leo ran his eye over her notes. One of the advantages of having someone so young annotate the manuscript was that her handwriting was still bordering on schoolgirlish, as though she was anxious to win a gold star for it. Rounded, regular letters, nothing scrawled or slipshod like Reuben’s could be on occasion – or his own, for that matter.
‘“Pace drops off here”?’ He raised his eyebrows.
‘It does, Leo. You need to cut the whole scene. It’s irrelevant. I drifted off a bit.’
‘Ah.’
It was a scene to which he was particularly attached, where the heroine harks back to her youth. He picked up his pen and ran a diagonal line through it. Sometimes you had to make a decision about who to trust, and he had decided to trust Zoe – in this, at least.
He liked being with her. He didn’t love her, he assured himself. He loved Jenny. But Zoe gave him the kind of attention Jenny never had. Jenny supported him and saw to his physical and material needs, but deep down she didn’t care about his writing. She respected what he did, in an abstract sense, but the idea of her sitting for hours, reading and critiquing his work like Zoe had been doing, was unimaginable. He had never suggested it and neither had she. She read his novels once they were physical books, but even then he wasn’t sure she read them properly. They weren’t her thing – she preferred romances. He didn’t resent it, just felt mildly dissatisfied. He had always felt mildly dissatisfied.
Zoe filled that vacuum. When she loved something he had written it made him euphoric. If she accused him of being boring, like she had just now, it could throw him off-kilter for hours. He had grown to live for her approbation, he realized, as ridiculous as that sounded. He cast her a wary glance. Was she drawing him in? Lulling him? Last night he’d had a fraught sexual dream about her and had woken feeling pleasantly shocked at himself.
How had it come to this? Never mind this novel, his life had turned into something out of a Hitchcock movie. He groaned inwardly. He was lonely, that was all. Jenny was so wrapped up in her new career, far more interested in her clients than she was in him. It couldn’t last, and it would be cruel of him to allow Zoe to think it could. But for the time being, he was enjoying himself, and that was allowable, wasn’t it? So much of his life was hard work, painful and filled with guilt. He deserved the respite these hours gave him.
She’d said something. He had been so lost in his thoughts that he hadn’t heard her.
‘Sorry. What?’
‘Take me upstairs, Leo.’ Her voice was soft. ‘Please.’
‘Zoe, I …’
His stomach muscles clenched. Had she read his mind?
‘I just want to get out into the fresh air.’
No, he realized, embarrassed at his mistake. That’s not what she meant.
49
Zoe
HE LOOKS AT ME LIKE I’M MAD.
‘You are joking, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t mean let me go, I just mean take me up there and give me a few minutes outside. You can tie my hands behind my back. Please, Leo. Nothing’s going to happen.’
I watch his face. I’m sure he’s thinking that if he does it once, I’ll expect it again. And what if my demands grow greater? What if one thing leads to another? I hold his gaze and feel a change going on in my body; a warming, a softening. Does he feel it too?
‘I won’t ask for anything else, I promise,’ I said. ‘I’ve worked so hard. You’re going to make money out of this book. I deserve a reward, don’t I?’
I hold my wrists together behind my back. Leo secures them with a black cable tie. He goes ahead of me and I follow him up the wooden staircase. When I step out of the hatch, he takes my arm to stop me falling over. The night air on my face is a shock. I expected a room of some sort, but instead I see the shadowy outline of shrubs, some bare-branched trees and, in the sky, the bright disc of a full moon. There is no house upstairs after all. I feel a bit of a fool for thinking there was.
My senses are invaded. I can hear strains of opera – it’s almost surreal. I can taste the air, I can smell green things. Leo draws me away from the opening on to a path and I lean back and look up at the stars.
‘Are you cold?’ he asks.
‘No.’
I lie because I don’t want to go back inside, not yet, but the truth is I’m freezing.
‘You’re shivering,’ he says matter-of-factly.
Leo takes off his jacket and arranges it over my shoulders. I turn three hundred and sixty degrees, slowly taking everything in. I breathe ‘oh’ into the air.
He holds my arm and we walk around the garden, like lovers taking a stroll. I have my trainers on but I wish I didn’t. I want to feel the dewy grass between my toes, I want the gravel to dig into the soles of my feet.
